Friedbeef’s 15 ways to extend laptop battery life
We’ve previously covered some similar approaches to save battery life, but since ‘no power’ equals ‘no go’ it’s always good to refresh your battery approach (as well as your battery). Friedbeef has a list of fifteen battery saving tips that covers most of the important strategies like:
- Use Hibernate instead of Sleep. While true, the trade-off is a longer restoration time to get up and running. If you can live with that, then Hibernate is your best friend. Me…I’m a sleeper.
- Dim your screen. Whether I’m out and about with my UMPC or at home on my MacBook, I’m constantly aware of how bright or dim my screen is. While you can easily tweak your power settings to control this, I occasionally tweak manually as needed to eek out another 10% or so.
(via Lifehacker)
The ThinkPad x61 has a Battery Stretch utility that can be used to manually set many different subsystems for those times you need to “stretch” the battery a few more minutes when it’s getting dangerously low.
I guess I’m in the minority, but when I’m running on battery power, I go mad when power saver settings slow down the processor and dim the screen. Personally, I find my productivity so dimished that I prefer to just keep everything running at top speed so I can finish my tasks faster and not be squinting to read a dim screen or waiting for the laptop to catch up with my keystrokes because it’s so throttled. My reasoning is that I can put the machine away much faster to save what remains of the battery than if I was “saving” power but moving 50% more slowly. However, as I never see anyone else mention doing this, I must be a bigtime outlier in this sort of battery usage!!
That’s why the x61 Tablet rocks. It’s so fast that even when throttled down it’s still fast and gets good battery life too.
I love ThinkPad tablets, but they’re almost twice the weight of my P1610. To me anything over 3lbs. just isn’t really portable, especially not to someone who works in NYC and has to walk long distances, laptop at his side. Every ounce counts…
If my new Macbook Pro with LED backlight is any indication, the days of stretching your battery by dimming the backlight are coming to an end. I’m not getting close to the stretch I used to get by dimming it.
My Wifi LED on my Q1 is still on even after I disable the feature (from task bar); hope it’s really turned off .
Also how do you hibernate on a Q1? When I select Start-> Turn computer off*, then on the dialog box, there are only 3 options: Standby, Stop and restart (*=free translation fron the French OS). There is NO hibernate option.
How do you activate it? And then, does it still let you choose between standby and hibernate? The first one to use between frequent “off” periods during the day, and hibernate in the evening for a long “off” state at night.
By the way, when my battery reaches 4-5% the device automatically goes into standby; does it go further into hibernate automatically when the battery nears 0%?
Don’t you think that your applications should be more power-aware, rather than having to resort to closing down applications depending on whether you’re connected or not? I wrote about it here (http://softwareblogs.intel.com/2007/07/29/changing-perspective-on-extending-battery-life/) . (You don’t seem to have trackbacks…)
Verizon is about the only place you can get the authentic RIM product and matching door. Most other sites are out of stock and even when they are in stock they have the black battery door which looks like crap.
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http://www.batteryfast.com/toshiba/l20.php
Verizon is about the only place you can get the authentic RIM product and matching door. Most other sites are out of stock and even when they are in stock they have the black battery door which looks like crap. http://www.batteryfast.co.uk
I tested this camera for a client. I didn’t have the light running for more than 15 minutes. The battery lasted approximately 6 hours before recharging. The LCD, however, had a few dead pixels – never saw this before. Tried returning for exchange and had to put up quite a fight. Anyone else seen this? http://www.batteryfast.com